Media data comes in many forms including, but not limited to, video, audio, still images, and text. Presently, media data is captured, that is recorded, and stored on a storage media that is dependent on the form of media data. For example, video is captured by video cameras, audio is captured via microphone and recorders, and still images are captured by cameras.
Currently, video cameras and digital recorders are used for a wide range of applications. While the use of video cameras and digital recorders is typically associated with personal events. There are many applications of the use such devices for commercial purposes including security and surveillance. For example, police car video cameras are used to record stop encounters.
As described above, more than one form of media may be used to capture an event. For example, a security camera and a digital audio recorder may capture both video and audio data respectively from a crime scene. Afterwards, a police officer or security supervisor may add text captions to the video using computer-based software or on-camera functions. Combining different forms of media for presentation is termed multimedia, and accordingly there may be multimedia capture of security events and crime scenes.
Presently, captured media is most commonly stored as digital data, thereby becoming a data asset. Digital data assets may be streamed to users or consuming devices in real time, or may be captured and later transported as a file for streaming.
The consumer electronics revolution has made digital video cameras, digital still cameras, and digital recorders ubiquitous. Accordingly, commoditized video cameras and digital recorders have become available for security applications. Digitization and miniaturization has led to the production of video cameras that can fit in a mobile phone with ever improving resolution. Further, the advent of commoditized compact memory has enabled large amounts of video data to be stored in such devices, in a cost effective manner. As of this writing, 16 gigabytes (GB) of storage space can store 40 hours of video data with average resolution. Accordingly, large amounts of digital data assets may be captured from many different sources and in many different media. Furthermore, the individuals that capture a security event or crime scene with a camera or recorder need not necessarily be related. For example, at a crime scene, there may be surveillance cameras that were stationed in the area long before the scene; there may be police officers with mobile cameras and recorders, and another police officer taking still shots with a digital camera.
With the Internet, digital data assets may be shared in both in edited and non-edited form. In the past, files were shared simply by transferring peer-to-peer, such as e-mailing files or uploading to a LAN based server. Later, digital data assets were posted and distributed via web pages via internet protocols. Currently police officers and security personnel can post and distribute digital data assets to a centralized location via web services, with facilities to search and tag on posted assets. In this way, different recordings of the same crime scene might be aggregated to help solve a crime case, regardless of who originally captured or uploaded the digital asset.
In general, there is presently a critical mass of digital data assets that can be correlated and combined together. For example, panoramic software can stitch together different still photos taken at the same time of the same event and result into a single photo. Different video and audio feeds may be mixed together to make a composite rendering. However, such efforts are typically manual in nature and use relatively short media clips.
At present, automating the correlation and combination of multimedia of relatively large long data assets, such as those hundreds or thousands of hours in length is not done. Moreover, recording metadata to aid in correlating the data assets with other data assets is not presently done. Finally, using such correlating metadata to automate correlations of data assets into a combination presentation is not presently done.